The title sums most of it up. I’m not dead. The blog got pretty close to being dead, but isn’t quite yet. This translation endeavor, also, is still alive. And thanks in part to the little kick delivered by this fine fellow’s comment, we have a release!

Summer Specials 3 and 4 are the last strips in the long string of specials that go in between “Episode 12 (see it here)” and “Episode 13 (see it here)” of the original 4-koma-style strips. I’d recommend taking a look at “Episode 13” again after reading these two chapters since there is a little bit of continuity between the story at the end of Summer Special 4 and Episode 13.

As again, a reminder here that these strips weren’t released freely online, so if you like Hana no Android Gakuen I encourage you to support the authors by buying a volume (paper book and e-book). These are of course in Japanese, and no official English translations exist to the best of my knowledge. As long as this persists I will for my part commit to eventually translating everything in the first volume release – unless a much faster-working translation group picks it up or I get shut down by the creators for releasing non-free strips.)

Not an update worth writing home about, but an update nonetheless, with what little significance it brings. I guess this is a giving of voice, however small, to a defiance of sorts – a flail and a flinch that says I’m not quite ready nor willing to throw the towel and let the blog die just yet, notwithstanding the curveballs life has been throwing me of late. The great difficulty with the issue of blogging, at least for me, is that blogging – or more specifically writing – is for me immensely beneficial and stimulating, but also demanding of a synchrony of time, place and mood – mental room and solitude – that is getting harder and harder to achieve nowadays. One is tempted more and more to say “this isn’t working out, I’m busy, there is much to do. Better to put it down with finality than to have it forever hanging on my conscience – always desired but rarely reached”. At least for the near future, the plan is still to hold out somehow until the next time I am able to find the right spirit, topic, time and place to write a good blog.

… There’s still more android manga to translate too.

Anyway, back on topic. I had the pleasure of looking up the lyrics of this song recently – the second ED of that great series Fate/Zero. It was wonderful. Suffocatingly beautiful. Almost poetic. And as usual, not being satisfied with available translations that I’ve found, here is my own. Reflect on Kiritsugu and Irisviel as you listen – their romance and ideals. And then in the backdrop, the ideals, the passions, the efforts of the many other participants of the Fate/Zero stage – how they burned bright and intense, to eventually fizzle and fade, but not without first adding heretofore absent illumination to the Fate/Zero whole.

Merry Christmas from Between Linux and Anime. May the dream never cease to light our horizons, and may our weary steps thereto never falter for long.

Hit F8 to listen to it while it’s up (or play it from the player at the sidebar). Hit the jump for some pictures, Romaji lyrics, and translations.

(Reminder here that this strip wasn’t released freely online, so if you like Hana no Android Gakuen I encourage you to support the authors by buying a volume (paper book and e-book). These are of course in Japanese, and no official English translations exist to the best of my knowledge. As long as this persists I will for my part commit to eventually translating everything in the first volume release – unless a much faster-working translation group picks it up or I get shut down by the creators for releasing non-free strips.)

I seem to be doing this a lot lately, but I’ll make it quick this time :) Juuuust in case you haven’t actually seen them, a bunch of veteran dudes are trying to fund a high quality anime episode – in its entirety – via Kickstarter. That’s basically it: fully crowd funded anime, where creator retains artistic rights and freedom and is answerable only to the audience.

There’s only three days left to the campaign at this writing, so here are some quick pointers to what I consider the important bits:

Step 1: Watch the trailer

Step 2: Read the last paragraphs of the Kickstarter page. Just look for “In closing, we will say again and again” and read from there.

Step 5: If any of that spoke to you, throw some money at them. (ASAP! Campaign ends in three days as of this writing)

Pace of funding has been accelerating, with about 70k being pledged in the last 24 hours, so it’s actually looking like they may yet make it to the goal. Which is kind of crazy. It’s a tired rhetoric in this blog by now perhaps, but a success here will be quite unprecedented, and perhaps be part of the catalyst for an inevitable change in workings of the anime industry. We want anime to become more transparent, more accessible, more sensitive to the fans (globally!) and less to investor whims, so that’s where our money should go. Into the projects and ideas that are nudging the industry in a direction we like.

I finished Fate/Zero some time ago and enjoyed it immensely. It was a very dense show with a lot of rich, inter-weaving ideas – so much so that a detailed treatment is probably an impossibility for a single post. But I still want to write a little on it, in part also to hopefully build some momentum for tackling more difficult post topics later on. So I’m going to focus this post on Saber – a single thread in Fate/Zero’s yarn, but one that is I think quite wonderful and radiant. Hopefully I’ll also be able to pivot on that to say some general things about Fate/Zero itself – the kind of show it is like.

Here we go! Summer Special 1 (originally announced here). Translating this chapter took more effort than expected because of the bizarre references, so I ended up releasing just one instead of two chapters as I had hoped to. Not too much more to say this time, so I’ll keep it short for once :)

(Reminder here that this strip wasn’t released freely online, so if you like Hana no Android Gakuen I encourage you to support the authors by buying a volume (paper book and e-book). These are of course in Japanese, and no official English translations exist to the best of my knowledge. As long as this persists I will for my part commit to eventually translating everything in the first volume release – unless a much faster-working translation group picks it up or I get shut down by the creators for releasing non-free strips.)

I’ve already mentioned this in my previous post, but there’s only barely a week left, and we got 40% of the funding target left to fill. Which is kinda sorta bad, and here I am posting another nag! So in case you haven’t heard, the gist: Some veteran animators and NPO Animator Supporters are running a Indiegogo campaign to set up low-cost dormitories for budding Japanese animators drowning in a harsh industry. Yes, for the suffering guys who make our anime. So if you’re a fan (or a sympathetic bystander) do trot over and give them some love – either in the form of a monetary contribution to the campaign if you can, or at least by spreading the word. Thank you! If on the other hand you feel you need a little more convincing on why you should bother.. well, read on :)

Reason #1 is in short that life is shitty being a young animator. But I’m not going to delve very deeply into that, and I will instead refer you to this post for a vivid and somewhat passionate detailing of the problem. I’m going to focus on another reason why I think you should be donating to their cause.

A good while ago I wrote a similar post asking for support for the Time of Eve Kickstarter campaign. Severalother comparable projects have sprouted ever since, which is a good trend, but we need it to continue gathering momentum. Because a great disconnect has existed for too long now between the animators and studios in Japan and the sizable foreign audience of anime content. And with the age of the open Internet upon us, it’s high time we closed that gap.

Not too long ago there was still no way for overseas fans to legitimately watch anime without waiting months for the DVD and Bluray release. Thanks to the opening of Internet-based channels by folks like Crunchyroll now, this has I am told recently been remedied for American audiences (though where I’m from nothing much has changed at all). And I think part of the reason for this development is an entering into the consciousness of the industry in Japan of the sheer volume of audience they have abroad. It is a simple argument then: the more the Japanese creators are thinking about their potential consumers abroad, the more channels we’ll have to obtain them legally and conveniently outside Japan. And one way we can help hold and expand the attention of the Japanese creators on the foreign scene is, I think, by making sure these english, international crowd-sourced campaigns sail cleanly across their finish lines. To show that they work, that the greater world is listening and responding.

Aside from hopefully making Japanese creators aware of us, another argument is we want Japanese creators to be aware of the Internet. The old norm of making shows and showing it on Japanese TV, then spending a couple of months packaging the content into pretty but prohibitively priced DVD and Bluray box-sets and hoping the sales thereof will turn a good profit is a lumbering tradition that needs to be modernized. Platforms like Indiegogo and Kickstarter can demonstrate that, in the new world of interconnected computers, reaching a foreign audience can be trivial. And if you make something people care about and sell it right, money can come flowing your way – not via the arcane and expensive pathways of shops and distribution agents, but in a single hop across the Internet. Hopefully this will give way to new ways of funding anime, new business models in which the creators and the end-consumers are the primary determinants of how things get produced and sold, and eventually, a modernized anime industry in which the Internet is not a constantly looming threat of piracy, but a powerful tool for community and communication, as well as sales and distribution.

So aside from being about the dreams and livelihood of our suffering animators in Japan, this is also, I think, about change. About modernization and a stronger industry, as well as a more connected community and a more useful Internet. Of course, it’s only a small step, but it’s a small step you get to be a part of, and that you can help make happen :) So how about it? If you can, please do trot over and give them some love

Oh Mein Gott it’s been five months! I’ve been very preoccupied for much of this year (hence the long hiatus). Still, I’m glad I managed to get this out this month as I told myself I would. I owe this in part to my brother who has volunteered to do the cleaning – and he has done a fantastic job, putting my previous amateurish work to shame :)

This strip is Apple’s chapter, about the iPhone 5. In the manga volume I was sent, this came immediately after the previously released Summer Expansion Edition, although from the weekly ascii site it looks like it was chronologically released much later.

After this will come the four two-paged Summer Specials. Now that my life has regained some semblance of order (and with my brother blazing through the cleaning work), I’m optimistic that I’ll be able to make the next release happen much sooner than it took for this one to get out. I apologize as always for being so insufferably slow.

Reminder here that this strip wasn’t released freely online, so if you like Hana no Android Gakuen I encourage you to support the authors by buying a volume (paper book and e-book). These are of course in Japanese, and no official English translations exist to the best of my knowledge. As long as this persists I will for my part commit to eventually translating everything in the first volume release – unless a much faster-working translation group picks it up or I get shut down by the creators for releasing non-free strips.

And finally while we’re on the topic of supporting authors, if you haven’t already, please go over to the Animator Dormitories for Start-ups indiegogo page and consider making a donation, or at least help spread the word. Not only would it be cool to cultivate budding animators and help them live a difficult dream – I’m convinced it’ll also be good for us (foreign fans) in the long run if our Japanese content creators are more aware of us and think more about engaging us directly.

That’s it for the rambling! Look for previously released translations in the category archives.

Hit the jump for the released strips. Like all Japanese manga, this should be read right to left, top to bottom.

Wow how far have I had to trim my ambitions for a Christmas release. I originally wanted to release two chapters PLUS an anime editorial blog in time for Christmas, but difficult circumstances as well as the decidedly higher difficulty of translating this chapter forced me to trim it down to just releasing this chapter. Believe it or not, even getting just this chapter out on time cost me some sleep. I think the result is a quality release, though, and hopefully that makes up for things a little bit.

There is quite a lot to say about this chapter. Firstly: Chronology and chapter names, which got pretty confusing after Weekly Ascii released a bunch of “specials”-type strips to disrupt their original, incrementally numbered 4-koma “episodes”. Only some of those specials are actually freely available online, so I was myself a little confused for awhile. Using the non-free manga volume given to me by friendly neighbourhood reader Elaine Nguygen though, the chronological order appears to be as follows:

Edit: Apparently there is only one summer expansion and the second is called “Apple’s chapter” and is about the iPhone 5. Very confusing -_-

Of these, the first 12 episodes, episode 13, and the 4 “Specials” are all freely available online and have all been previously translated and released.

This release is for the what was originally branded as “Summer Expansion Edition”, and is also the first release of a strip that is not freely available online. This strip was originally published in a printed copy of Weekly Ascii, and is now also part of the on-sale manga volume (which contains all previously published material as well as new original ones).

With that out of the way, the next thing is character names. People have pointed out to me that the names I used disagreed with other online sources. For my part I have always tried to maintain a close transliteration of the names in the raw, but this will hopefully be settled once and for all now: apparently they eventually confirmed and settled on an official set of names, AND also published an English article which contains all of those names romanized, so from this strip forth I will start adopting these new “official” names in accordance with the raws.

Also, with the released strips starting to go up on manga aggregation sites, I will henceforth burn TL notes and credits into the images themselves so they also get transmitted when uploaded to these external aggregation sites.

Whew! That was quite the mouthful. Lastly I would like to remind you again that this is the first release of a strip that is not freely available online, so if you like Hana no Android Gakuen I encourage you to support the authors by buying a volume (paper book and e-book). These are of course in Japanese, and no official English translations exist to the best of my knowledge. As long as this persists I will for my part commit to eventually translating everything in the first volume release – unless a much faster-working translation group picks it up or I get shut down by the creators for releasing non-free strips.

I think that’s all I have to say. Hit the jump for the translated strips, and remember that like all Japanese manga, this should be read right to left, top to bottom. Look for translations of previous chapters in the category archives.